Tag "Fossil fuel"

Norway’s $1 trillion oil fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, is to plunge billions of dollars into wind and solar power projects.
The decision follows Saudi Arabia’s oil fund selling off its last oil and gas assets.
Analysts say the investments are likely to power faster growth of green energy.
Unlisted projects make up more than two-thirds of the whole renewable infrastructure market, which is worth trillions of dollars.
But now the sum the fund can invest in green projects has been doubled to $14 billion.
“Even a fund built on oil is seeing that the future is green,” said Jan Erik Saugestad, CEO of Storebrand Asset Management.
In March, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund said it would dispose of its investments in 134 companies that explore for oil and gas, worth almost $8 billion.
The fund divested $6.5 billion of coal-related investments in 2015.
“Unlisted renewable energy is a growth industry,” said Tom Sanzillo at IEEFA.
In 2017, $18.8 billion went into fossil fuel investments, compared with just $0.4 billion into renewables.

Ireland’s landmark Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill passed the Seanad, or upper house, on Thursday, putting the Emerald Isle on track to become the first country in the world to divest from fossil fuel-related funds.
The bill—which requires the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund to sell off about €318 million ($361 million) investments in coal, oil, gas and peat assets over a five year period—now heads to President Michael D. Higgins for signature, where it will likely become law by the end of the year, according to the Irish Times.
Alice-Mary Higgins, an Independent Senator and the president’s daughter, was jubilant about the bill’s “swift passage” in the Seanad.
Huge congratulations to @ThomasPringleTD who initiated the #FossilFuel divestment Bill and successfully stewarded i… https://t.co/5RYSDMrN45 — Alice Mary Higgins (@aliceeire) 1542938109.0 President Higgins told Green News in July that Ireland has a role in tackling climate change.
He said the bill, first introduced by independent Donegal Deputy Thomas Pringle in 2016, was “greatly” needed and a “testament to cross-party cooperation and support.” “While we are a small nation, we have a huge impact on the most vulnerable citizens in the world.
It’s morally imperative that we urgently respond to climate change as it’s those most vulnerable who cannot afford to wait for us to act accordingly,” he added.
Ireland on Path to Become First Country to Divest from Fossil Fuels https://t.co/gOUxFRu5AC #Ireland #Divestment… https://t.co/Kj5RpMqidg — EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) 1531491126.0 The bill’s passage is a major step for Ireland, which ranks last among European Union countries in the 2018 Climate Change Performance Index. “Ireland can finally hold its head up high on an issue of climate policy, as the first country in the world to put a national divestment strategy into place,” O’Sullivan said in a press release. “This bill will help protect us from climate change, will allow us to stand as an example to the world and protect Irish tax payers from massive losses as the world moves to a post-carbon future.”

CITY councillors supported a call to withdraw investments in fossil fuel and fracking companies from a multi-billion pension fund.
The Oxfordshire Pension Fund is run by Oxfordshire County Council but is used by more than 200 employers.
Richard Howlett, a Labour councillor, took through a motion originally proposed by his party colleague John Tanner on Monday.
Mr Howlett said fracking in particular was an ‘appalling idea viewed at many angles’.
Blasting through rocks to force them open and extract oil and gas in the fracking process is a ‘short-termist and dangerous way’ of investing pensions, he added.
Mr Tanner, the council’s former leader, was at another meeting that evening.
His motion, to ask the pension fund to remove its savings, was supported by 38 councillors at Oxford Town Hall.
Another two councillors abstained from the vote.
Employers in the pension fund include free, primary, comprehensive and international schools, Oxford Brookes University and councils.
But also included are A2 Dominion, a housing association which has development across Oxfordshire, Citizens Advice bureaus and Skanska, which carries out roadworks for the county council.

Fossil fuel producers, airlines and electrical utilities outspent environmental groups and the renewable energy industry 10 to 1 on lobbying related to climate change legislation between 2000 and 2016, according to a new analysis released Wednesday.
“We seem to have a public opinion fetish where if we get public opinion to be supportive of climate change legislation, then it’ll happen,” Brulle said.
“My answer to that is, gee, well, we should have gun control legislation then.” During the period examined by the study, expenditures on federal lobbying aimed at climate issues topped $2 billion, representing on average 3.9 percent of annual federal lobbying dollars.
Searching for a dozen key terms ― including “climate change,” “global warming” and “carbon” ― he pinpointed more than 64,100 reports of such lobbying, identified the reports by business sector, and compared those figures to the sectors’ annual overall spending on lobbying.
Many other representatives of major corporate interests lobby the government but keep it under 20 percent of their time.
The climate change denial movement remains powerful if splintered.
Oil giants traditionally funded the network of misinformation outlets seeding doubt about the role of fossil fuels in warming the planet.
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas sector’s top lobbying group, noted the study’s finding that the fossil fuel industry spent nearly 18 percent of all climate lobbying dollars during the period examined, but suggested it wasn’t the whole story.
The EPA under then-Administrator Scott Pruitt started the process to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a federal rule that would have incentivized utilities to use more renewable energy and scale back emissions from coal.
We seem to have a public opinion fetish where if we get public opinion to be supportive of climate change legislation, then it’ll happen.

CC BY-SA 4.0, Link Guest essay by Eric Worrall Don’t mention the “N” word – top economist Joseph Stiglitz has urged the US government to impose economically painful taxes to penalise fossil fuels, to facilitate a switch to renewables and energy efficiency technologies which have not yet been developed.
One of the world’s top economists has written an expert court report that forcefully supports a group of children and young adults who have sued the federal government for failing to act on climate change.
Joseph Stiglitz, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics in 2001 and has written extensively about environmental economics and climate change, makes an economic case that the costs of maintaining a fossil fuel-based economy are “incalculable,” while transitioning to a lower-carbon system will cost far less.
… Read more: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11072018/joseph-stiglitz-kids-climate-change-lawsuit-global-warming-costs-economic-impact Although the report repeatedly mentions and references former NASA GISS director James Hansen, who is a fan of nuclear power, Stiglitz himself does not directly mention the nuclear option, instead urging carbon taxes and “support” for the development of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.
Defendants could facilitate this transition with standard economic tools for dealing with externalities, for example a tax or levy on carbon (a price on the externality) and the elimination of subsidies on fossil-fuel production.
But the claimed externality costs of CO2 only apply if CO2 emissions cause future harm.
Carbon taxes hurt poor people worst of all – a fact Stiglitz admits, though he qualifies his admission with claims that short term harm is worth the future benefit.
Nuclear power currently produces just under 20% of US electricity.
Copying the 1970s French nuclear programme, raising nuclear power to 75% of US electricity production, would reduce power plant CO2 emissions to 1744 / 80% x (100% – 75%) = 545 million tons per annum, saving over a billion tons per annum of CO2 emissions.
If CO2 is the serious issue Stiglitz claims, ignoring the possibility of avoiding harm to poor people by converting US electricity production to affordable nuclear power seems a very curious oversight.

The Trump administration’s plan to bail out coal and nuclear industries could cause one American death from pollution for every two to four additional coal jobs generated over the next two years, according to new research.
A study released Thursday from Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank, finds that the plan could cause between 353 to 815 premature deaths between 2019 and 2020 while generating fewer than 800 coal jobs.
The study also finds that the plan would increase CO2 emissions by 22 million tons, or roughly the same amount as 4.3 million additional cars on the road.
As reported by Bloomberg: Although nuclear power does not generate carbon dioxide that drives climate change, burning coal does—and the possible federal intervention would boost those emissions by 22 million short tons over two years, the analysis finds.
The administration is justifying its push to subsidize coal and nuclear power plants on national security grounds, with Trump touting coal as bomb proof during a visit to a West Virginia charity dinner on Tuesday. “You bomb a pipeline, that’s the end of the pipeline,” Trump said. “With coal, that stuff is indestructible.”
Trump Administration Plans Costly Taxpayer Bailout of Unprofitable Energy Industries https://t.co/oDn4G7Fl6S… https://t.co/ZyvbkH6beZ — EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) 1527870150.0 For a deeper dive: For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.

If you’re looking for good news on the climate front, don’t look to the Antarctic.
Last week’s spate of studies documenting that its melt rates had tripled is precisely the kind of data that underscores the almost impossible urgency of the moment.
It’s as if he’s on a reality show where the premise is to see how much petty corruption one man can get away with.
But from somewhat less likely quarters, there’s been reason this month for hope – reason, at least, to think that the basic trajectory of the world away from coal and gas and oil is firmly under way.
And from Wall Street came welcome word that market perceptions haven’t really changed: even in the age of Trump, the fossil fuel industry has gone from the world’s surest bet to an increasingly challenged enterprise.
Researchers at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis minced no words: “In the past several years, oil industry financial statements have revealed significant signs of strain: Profits have dropped, cash flow is down, balance sheets are deteriorating and capital spending is falling.
And the third problem for the fossil fuel industry?
And the third problem for the fossil fuel industry?
According to IEEFA, that would be the climate movement – a material financial risk to oil and gas companies.
But it’s not what’s best for Canada | David Suzuki Read more The report’s authors write: “The financial world is just beginning to understand the fundamental weakness of the fossil fuel sector, and barely acknowledges the global climate movement’s growing power and reach.

As energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies improve and prices drop, global demand for fossil fuels will decline, “stranding” new fossil fuel ventures—likely before 2035, according to the study in Nature Climate Change, “Macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil fuel assets.”
GravostoreUSA Visit Site Researchers from Cambridge University and elsewhere found technological advances will strand fossil fuel assets regardless of “whether or not new climate policies are adopted,” but that “the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2°C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand.”
Investing tax dollars to expand fossil fuel development and infrastructure, including pipelines, is irresponsible and incompatible with Canada’s Paris agreement commitments, putting everyone at economic risk, and leaving us with polluted air, water and land, and increasing climate impacts and health-care bills.
But without strong [climate] policies, it is already happening.
But if people stop putting funds now in fossil fuels, they may at least limit their losses.”
Researchers found that while the shift from fossil fuels to conservation and clean energy is moving quickly enough to strand fossil fuel assets, it’s not happening fast enough to keep global average temperature from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
A study in Nature Energy found energy efficiency improvements could limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels—the aspirational Paris agreement target.
Many experts have suggested limiting warming to that degree would require large-scale bioenergy deployment (burning forest and plant products for energy) and negative emissions technologies (removing CO2 from the air and storing it on land, underground or in the oceans).
Technological and social innovation at the consumer and industrial level, including “the spread of digital services in the global south and the rise of vehicle-sharing in the global north” would fuel most improvements.
New York Takes Giant Step to Divest From Fossil Fuels https://t.co/MvWXY7WCVF #DivestNY #divest @350 @billmckibben… https://t.co/1K40LGTZRS — EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) 1513800942.0 David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

The research firm is forecasting that coal use, globally, will fall from 38% today to 11% by 2050.
Meanwhile, wind and solar electricity will make up 50% of the world’s energy mix — a function of the falling price of the underlying technologies as well as $548 billion being invested in storage capacity by 2050.
“The future electricity system will reorganize around cheap renewables — (and) coal gets squeezed out.” The study goes on to say that natural gas will get used mostly to firm up intermittent wind and solar energies.
Does this mean that coal or natural gas should rally political support to stop the trend or invest in new technologies that could improve their efficiencies and hence their emissions profiles?
Natural gas produces about half the emissions as coal does.
It says that it can produce power at $0.06 per kilowatt-hour — on par with today’s combined-cycle natural gas plants.
And if there is a market for advanced coal production, Southern Company wants eventually to sell its coal gasification technologies, which it says will become as clean as a combined cycle natural gas plant.
So, it must import it in the form of liquefied natural gas, or LNG.
But both political and economic obstacles remain — issues that could cloud Bloomberg’s rosy forecast for wind and solar.
And there’s also the the just-enacted tariffs on solar panels coming from China.

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